by Pratt, Tim
I pulled away from her. “Do you know Charlotte?"
She shook her head, looking at the pavement. Tears glistened in her eyes—I could just see them in the light of a street lamp. “No, Michael. Me and Charlotte ... we're almost mutually exclusive. If you hadn't gone to that bar, if you'd gone to that theater party instead, you might have met another wallflower there. You know, two shy people who didn't know anyone, talking together in self defense. She might have been a physics student. You might have become friends, or rivals, had a conversation ... or a love affair.” She shook now, really shivered, and more hairs came loose from the pile on top of her head, falling into her face.
She didn't look familiar. I wanted her to look familiar. But she didn't. She was just a beautiful stranger with a beautiful, strange story. She might have been crazy. I was too captivated to care.
“I don't know what to say,” I said. “I don't know what you're saying. But, I mean, you're here, now..."
“No,” she said, sharply. “Almost anything can happen, but not that. I fooled myself, I shouldn't have come here. You might have met this girl, you might have had a love affair, but you met Charlotte, instead, and she damaged you. She broke you in important ways."
That hurt, it stung, but it was true. “I can heal,” I said, a little defensively.
She didn't look at me. She stared at the asphalt street, and spoke in a controlled monotone. “You might have met this girl, at this party ... you might have had a love affair, moved in with her ... you might have been out walking one night, coming back from a Chinese restaurant. She might have crossed the street, at the same time some drunk came careening around the corner ... you might have watched that girl die, right there on the asphalt, right in front of you.” I heard the strain in her voice, the tightness, how close she was to breaking.
“And maybe something happened then, in that instant before the car hit,” she went on, less tense, more sad and resigned. “The smell of copper pennies and burning motor oil filled the air, a jingle of bells, many paths opening before the girl, the girl about to die. Of course she'd choose one of the paths, wouldn't she? She'd do anything, to keep from dying. So maybe the girl wouldn't have died, but only disappeared, right before your eyes. And eventually you'd convince yourself she just abandoned you, that you didn't see her disappear at all. You'd become bitter, and withdraw even more completely from the world.” She laughed, harshly, the sound echoing off the empty buildings. “That's just speculation, of course. I've never been back there, to the place where the forking paths began. I'm afraid to return."
She looked at my face. “Oh, Michael. I've been so many other places. To worlds where I didn't die, where we're still together, where I like to think there's happily ever after in store for us. I'm sure in some of those worlds there is; there'd have to be, wouldn't there? But I had no place in those worlds. You already had a Merrilee there, and I couldn't take her place. Even in those happy worlds there were differences, unwanted pregnancies, different jobs, my fellowship falling through ... They weren't the world we would have had, if that car hadn't come, if ... for whatever reason ... the god of the crossroads or the unprecedented quantum event or whatever happened to me hadn't happened. But I kept trying, kept searching. I looked for worlds where we'd never met, where I could find you, where we could start over. In most of those worlds, you met Charlotte, and usually you two broke up. So here I am. Trying again, knowing I'll fail again."
I believed her; I believed in her; I needed her like a religion. “It's not too late,” I said. “We can—"
“You don't even know me,” she said softly. “And the Merrilee I am is not the Merrilee you would've loved. I've seen too much. I'm too estranged from reality ... or too tangled up in all the realities."
“This can be a new thing,” I said. “It doesn't have to be finding something you lost, it can be new."
She looked at me, her gray eyes still wet with tears, and she smiled. But it was such a sad smile. “Maybe we could. If it was that easy. But ... I have to keep moving, Michael."
“What are you talking about? What are you looking for? You'll never find—"
She shook her head. “It's not the search—that's just how I occupy myself, how I keep the will to continue. I have to move on, it's necessity. I should've died when that car hit, Michael. It's not a question of fate, or destiny. There are plenty of worlds where I'm alive and well. But my death is one of the things that had to happen, one of the potential outcomes. Instead, I lived. I don't know why, but my survival left something unsatisfied in the universe. Every day I live it gets a little worse, a little more serious. I can't die at the right time, or in the right place, or in the right way, anymore. But I still have to die, and the universe is doing its best to kill me. I worry, sometimes, that I'm doing something to the world, tearing at the fabric of things ... but then, my wandering up and down the forking paths is part of the fabric, isn't it? It's not something I chose."
“You choose to keep going,” I said.
Her expression hardened, her mouth turning down. “You try doing the noble thing when the grille of a car is coming at your face, Michael. You try giving yourself up to death when there's an alternative. I don't think you could do it.” She looked away, but kept talking, bitterly. “I forget that you don't know me, that you never will."
“Merrilee—"
“I wear black, to try to blend in. To make myself unobtrusive. In a way, it's a ghost that's after me. The ghost of my own death, a phantom possibility, getting realer by the moment. I can't scare it away with drums or masks, and so far I haven't been able to hide from it. Not for long, anyway. I thought I could find you, maybe bring you with me, drag you across the worlds with me...” She shook her head. “But you're not the one. Charlotte messed you up too much. I know. I've met other damaged Michaels, in other places. You'd never really trust me."
“Give me a chance,” I said.
“Too late,” she said, and stepped into the street.
I hadn't even heard the car coming. I don't know how I could have missed it. It was an old Corvair, the color of dried mustard, and it ran right through a stop sign and smashed into Merrilee as she stepped into the street.
I smelled burning motor oil, naturally enough. And pennies, old dirty copper pennies.
Somewhere across town, church bells rang the wrong time.
The Corvair swerved into the curb and stalled. An old hippie with stringy hair climbed out, eyes wild. “I hit her!” he shrieked. I couldn't tell if he was proud or appalled. “I hit her!"
I looked. Merrilee wasn't there, no body, no trace. I left the hippie lurching around the street. He peered under parked cars, looking for a body. I walked slowly home, to my rented room in a house full of strangers. I tried not to think of that house as a metaphor for my life.
Tonight I packed a bag. I'm giving myself over to the god of the crossroads. I'm going to Chapel Hill. There might be a Merrilee living there, one who's never met me, one who didn't die. I don't love Merrilee. I didn't even really know her. It's silly to think that she's destined for me. I believe there was a time, and a place, when we would have fallen in love ... but there might not be another such time and place in this world.
Still. It's somewhere to go. It's a direction. A place to begin.
It's better than the nothing I've had so far.
The God of the Crossroads
The god of the crossroads came to me in a shabby café in Missouri, during a time of confusion and malaise—a personal infestation of spiritual lice, a hundred chigger bites on the flesh of my sense of purpose, you might say.
The god rode in the head of my coffee server, a displaced punkette with mismatched eyes and buzzed-black hair and a silver ring in her left nostril. I recognized the god's arrival by the usual signs—the scent of copper and vanilla in the latté steam, the jingle of the bells hung on the door like
garlands, the revving and honking and backfiring of cars in the street trying to go every direction at once and
tearing themselves apart in the process.
“You're waiting again,” the god said in the punkette's sexy-raspy voice. “What are you waiting for?"
“I can't do it all,” I said, stirring cold coffee with my forefinger. “I hate to make decisions I can't revise later. I used to take comfort in quantum uncertainty and the many-worlds theory, the idea that somewhere else, some other me was doing everything.” The god snorted and said “Every other you is sitting
in this stupid coffee shop with the water—stained walls and the rude waitstaff, or else crouching by a rock staring at a stream, or looking up at a flyspecked motel ceiling—and all of you are getting yelled at by me.” The god came around the counter and thumped me in the chest. I
gasped as my heart sputtered, stuttered, stopped and then started again as all the engines outside revved and the cars surged forward. “Every road ends,” the punkette god said. “You can't linger forever.” Her mismatched eyes were one color now, the morning blue of a sky
I once saw in Georgia, and I wondered how many dawns and journeys I had left.
The god departed, and I whispered my thanks to the punkette, pushed back from the table, stood up, and walked into the remaining hours and miles of my life.
Fable from a Cage
Let me tell you a little fable, a story I crafted while sitting inside this dangling cage, where the rooks shit on me and steal my bread all day, and the smoke from your town fires stings my eyes all night.
Did you know the owls feed me? They bring me rats, mice, squirrels, and I eat them. That's why I haven't died yet. I'll never die, not here, wait all you like.
My fable? Yes. Oh, yes. It will, most assuredly, have a moral. Hunker down and listen for it, boys.
Once there was a thief who wandered in this country, passing from valley to valley in the night, loosening the ropes on cows and leading them away to sell in another town. He lifted bags of fruit from wagons, he picked up things that others put down. He was not a brigand, understand—he did not knock down defenseless women, he did not swagger with a looted sword on his hip, he did not terrorize the roads; indeed, he traveled between the roads more than on them. His crimes were all crimes of opportunity, but for an observant man, there are many opportunities for crime.
Not a brigand, no, but also nothing so grand as a burglar or a master thief. For there are men who can be like artists of the criminal trades, and this thief had known such men, but he did not compare to them. His was a lonely life, always running from one village to another, and he wondered sometimes how he had come to live in such a way—he, who had been born in the city.
Oh, yes, the city, you greedy little shits, look how your eyes widen and the drool falls from your lips. This thief had been born in the city, son of a banker, and he might have had a nice life there if he hadn't dallied with the daughter of a ship's captain ... but that is a different story, and not a fable at all—not a moral tale, in any sense, my young ones.
So this thief—who had a fine black beard, his one vanity, a beard as fine as mine was before this month without trimming—had fallen on hard times. He was down to his last coins, and his fine clothes (lifted from a tailor's shop, and almost exactly the right size) were stained from trying to steal a pig the night before, an act below even his usual flexible standards.
He was musing on what to do next, for he had decided that three years traveling this way was more than enough, but he felt too old to apprentice himself to a trade. Indeed, he knew himself well enough to know that the moment his master smith or cooper turned his back, he would feel compelled to snatch up their tools and run away, as much from boredom as from habit.
Walking through the forest that day in a dour mood, he caught his foot on a root and went sprawling. The fall knocked the wind from him, and he lay gasping on the forest floor. Because he could not do otherwise, he stared at the dirt before him ... and noticed a large golden bracelet in the dirt.
The thief sat up, smiling, for here was the perfect crime of opportunity, a bit of jewelry dropped by some passerby, which would not be missed, and which would enrich him. He reached down, wrapped his fingers around the gold, and tried to pick it up.
It moved a little, but something held it fast. The thief brushed the dirt away around the ring and found half of it sealed in black metal. He brushed away more dirt, curious now, and cleared a square of metal three feet to a side. The ring was no bracelet, but a handle for this trapdoor. The handle wasn't really gold, either—just brass.
The thief hesitated. He'd heard the stories, of course, of brigands with secret treasure-troves in the forest, where they kept their choicest things. Had he found such a place? And if so, did someone keep guard and watch over it?
Ah, but the opportunity. How could he walk away from such a rich possibility?
The thief wrapped his fingers tight around the ring and pulled. The door moved with surprising ease, without so much as a squeal of hinges. A great cloud of dust rose up with the trapdoor, and the thief turned his face away and coughed, his eyes watering. He let the trapdoor fall back, revealing a black square of darkness.
The thief got down on his knees and peered in, wishing for a lantern. There was no ladder and no steps—did the brigand king lower himself down with ropes suspended from the treetops?
Something shoved him from behind. The thief screamed as he fell—the brigand king had come upon him, and now he would die, sealed in with the dusty old treasures!
He hit the ground quickly, far sooner than he'd expected—and it wasn't ground at all, but a pile of soft fabric, furs and silks. A bit dusty, but more than enough to break his fall. Should he pretend to be dead? He turned over slowly, reasoning that since he'd been unable to see the bottom of the shaft from above, whoever had pushed him would be similarly blind. He peered up at the square of sky and branches, and saw no one. He sat up gingerly, but found no injuries or pains.
He sat waiting for a few moments, expecting a face to appear above, or a voice to call out, or—worst of all—for the trapdoor to swing shut, sealing him in irrevocably, leaving his spirit to guard this pile of fabrics and whatever other treasures lay in the darkness.
Something hissed, like a spitting cat, and the thief shrieked.
Then he saw light. The hiss had been the sound of an oil-soaked wick igniting.
Someone was down here with him.
He could see the lantern, a glass-sided, intricate thing, fit for a rich man's house. It sat on a marble pedestal, like the hacked-off base of a column. He saw no one near the lantern.
“I saw the trapdoor,” he began. “I found it by accident, and, well—just natural curiosity, you understand—I wanted to see what was underneath. I mean no harm—"
“You're a thief,” a low, neutral voice said. It came from a place in the cavern far from the lamplight.
The thief turned his head that way, startled. “Oh, no, I'm just a journeyman carpenter and—"
“A thief, and a liar.” There was satisfaction in the voice now. The only ones who ever sounded satisfied about finding a thief were people who planned to kill or beat that thief very badly.
“I have need of a thief,” the voice said, and then a figure stepped into the lantern-light
It was a woman.
Stop your tittering, snot-noses. This isn't a bawdy tale, you'll have to lurk under the tavern windows to hear one of those. No, she wasn't a beautiful woman. She looked like all your mothers, I'd wager, gray in her hair, lines in her face, a good sturdy build. Not a beauty. Not like that ship captain's daughter who got our thief in so much trouble. Not at all.
The woman was dressed incongruously in a fine fur coat. “You must be hungry,” she said. “Would you like something to eat? I have some meat, roasting."
“I didn't mean to—to fall into your ... home,” the thief said. “If you'll show me a way out, I'll be going."
“It's not a home, thief. It's a burial chamber, like the men in the desert are reputed to build—that's the joke, I think. A cavern f
illed with all the things I'd need to live well, after death. Fine dishes, fine silks, lanterns, pots, tools. All I've lacked is servants.” She smiled. “At least, until you arrived. And you want to leave? If I'd wanted you to get out, thief, why would I have shoved you in?” Her eyes were no particular color, it seemed to him, perhaps the gray of dirty wash-water, but she stared at him, not smiling at all now.
“Ah,” he said. “You pushed me, you say."
“You opened the door to my prison, thief. I wanted to thank you properly, and I couldn't do that with you up there.” She held up her arms, her sleeves falling away to reveal her forearms, which were covered with scars. “I have hands of air and fire. I can touch things far away."
The thief's obsession with opportunity extended to his words as well. He never knew when to keep silent, and he said “It seems to me that if you could push me into the hole from down here, you could have lifted that trap door yourself, and there'd be no need for thanks. Not that I don't appreciate your hospitality."
“It seems to me that a prison with a door that opens from the inside is no prison at all."
“Prisons are usually more secure than that,” the thief agreed. He had some experience in such matters. “But they don't usually open for the casual passer-by, either."
“You are not a casual passer-by. You are the thief I've been waiting for. No one else would even have seen the door, but you ... you were meant to find me."
“I'm sure I don't—"
“Shut up,” she said sharply, and then took a deep breath. “I offered you food, before. You smell like pigshit, but not roast pork, so I assume you had a wrestling match with dinner and dinner won. Eat with me, thief."
As he was hungry, and trapped anyway, he nodded. “I'd be most pleased."
“You have odd manners for a thief.” She turned, reaching into the darkness, doing things with her hands that the thief could not see.
“I have not always claimed that occupation. There was a time when I supped at tables, not in caverns underground."
She shoved a platter toward him. Several large green leaves sat in the center, covering something. “What's this?” he said, lifting a leaf away.